Toast

Monday 7 June 1999 23:00 BST

This review was first published in June 1999

Having lived many years of my life in NW3, I can speak confidently of the curse of Hampstead where restaurants are concerned. Melting pot the area once was - more so in its more bohemian past - but historically there has been little to keep residents close to home when eating out. TOAST,

which has just opened in the building above Hampstead Tube station, advertising "delicious trans-European cuisine", has been designed, says the publicity, to obviate the need of travel into the West End. "Why should you keep those Westminster parking attendants and clampers in business?" asks the press release. To remove said business from the happy clampers of Camden would be one answer.

A director of the company that owns Toast is Uri Nachoom who started the House on Rosslyn Hill and later The House Café, both in Hampstead. It can be assumed he knows his clientele, or anyway the slice of Hampstead bread which is his target. These folk presumably appreciate greeters wired up electronically to fellow waiting staff at the top of the stairs so that the arrival of a group of customers at ground-floor level can resemble the raid on Entebbe. Our storming of the door suffered a hiccup when there proved to be no record of our (pseudonymous) booking made only hours earlier. But there was no problem. It was early days - too early days, probably - and a table was found.

Toast is a members' bar as well as a public restaurant, a fact which presumably accounts for the prominence of the long bar in the leather-upholstered, night-club-mirrored dining room and might even explain the appalling music and sudden blasts of cold air, although I can't see why. A design company with the tautologous name of Four IV is apparently responsible for the look.

That the kitchen was still, as it were, finding its feet was apparent from the special introductory offer on a

brief menu of three courses for £13.50 (now £27). Two of the first courses belonged to the bagged-salad-leaves, assembly-line school of catering which, even if requiring little learned skill, can be better done than putting together assorted frilly leaves with what tasted like tinned artichoke hearts. Another salad did a bit better with a garnish of asparagus and mushrooms but surely even a Hampstead chick could rustle up something better than these at home.

In the main course pan-fried breast of guinea fowl on market vegetables with wild mushroom sauce and marscapone pomme purée (their description) was just about OK but fillet of daurade with a spring vegetable panache, coriander and citrus dressing (bits of orange flesh) and home-made black tagliatelle featured a bit of fish which seemed so stale and sour that some kitchens might have binned it. The chirpy waitress, anxious to please but seemingly all at sea, removed the more or less untouched plate without comment. Just as this place does not seem so much a heartfelt restaurant as a calculated exercise, so the above is not cooking, just a pastiche of culinary poses. The fact that the dessert of gelatine-heavy raspberry cheesecake was accompanied by a biscuit tuile pierced by an arrow of spun sugar only underlined that conclusion.

Gifted or even competent chefs are hard to find these days but with the help of enterprising wine merchants it is not hard to put together a creditable wine list. The wine list at Toast is pathetic which makes one suppose the management are pinning their hopes on the members drinking cocktails. Well, cheers.